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Star Buddy is an encyclopaedia of stars integrated with robotic observatory to explore the Sky.A Robotic environment is integrated with Stellarium which is an Opensource Desktop planetarium. User can select a celestial object(Star) in the desktop based planetarium, then StarBuddy will Spot the star in the sky through Astro-Laser torch and it also describes about the selected celestial object.This is a home based observatory tool developed for Students and armature astronomers to explore the sky

It is a C-DAC Bangalore research lab initiative under rapid prototyping category. The developed technology was customized by the team to address the needs of Robotic Observatory Challenge

Prototype developed:

Hardware requirements:
Arduino, 3 Servo motors, Astro laser

Software requirements:
Star Buddy Stellarium: Our version of stellarium from Github (We have modified it to send the coordinates through serial port to arduino).
Ubuntu OS with qextserialport installed
Audrino Uno Compiler

Description of working:

The user has to launch Stellarium on the desktop, which renders a complete image representation of the sky with the gamut of stars and all other celestial bodies, based on the user's geographical location. The user while navigating through the image may select (by clicking) a celestial body, the coordinates of which are captured by Stellarium, then the coordinates are sanitized and passed to Arduino-2 Servo motors which rotate a laser torch and point it in the direction of the celestial body, indicating the direction in which the celestial body can be found. Following which the prototype may connect to wikipedia or other web resources to fetch the user a description of the celestial body.

proposed idea to explore the sky:

The user can wear a wearable device on the wrist comprising of gyroscope, accelerometer and camera. The user may then raise the hand to point to a celestial body. The gyroscope and accelerometer are used to capture the direction and the trajectory in which the user is pointing and camera is used to capture the celestial space/body in that direction and trajectory. A software program may capture the 3 parameters, direction, trajectory and use the image to retrieve information about the celestial body/space for the user from the web. The computer or the android device will be tuned in with the application to give more information about the star.

The detailed documentation and circuit diagrams are available on github.